Cannot say I'm going to be much help here, but can you run 'ps ax | grep autofs' and pastebin the results? If there are no results then autofs isn't mounted. If you do have a result then I'm out of ideas.

I have not seen this issue at all so I'm really at a loss as to what to suggest. I don't know of anything that has changed in this regard and it all *just works (tm)* here. Sorry that I cannot seem to be of much use. Delete and recreate the device in your device tree? You've probably done that already. Does your NAS need a username/password to access? That will prevent mounts. I've not encountered the too many symlinks error, that seems fishy to me.

This is one area where I have really little to no knowledge. The autofs system that is used is completely foreign to me. If you were can jump into irc we might be able to do some testing. The dns-323 is an amazing little device, linux based, you can run your own distro on it, but that should not be required. I do not own one so I cannot test your specific device here. I have a QNAP NAS, very similar in many respects, and have no issues. This seems like a permissions issue based on what you are saying and I would look into any differences there.

With autofs the links will not show in /mnt/device unless something is trying to access files through /home/public/data/*/Windows Share. autofs will mount each mount as it is required and dynamically create and destroy links in /mnt/device. You should not alter /mnt/device/*. What you are describing sounds like a permission issue but I couldn't say where. Nothing has changed in LCME configuration regarding shares, only the distro upgrade. Check in webadmin that the proper share name is defined AND that it has the proper IP/MAC for the device. I've had issues in the past where 1004/1204 testing back and forth and the IPs got messed up on my NAS. That could cause what you are seeing. Umm. Yeah....